WinInsider — probably via Alex Ionescu — has a UEFI development course available. Alex is the author of VisualUEFI, which hides the non-Visual Studio’isms of EDK-II development. Alex, along with others at Wininternals, is also one of the current authors of the “Windows Internals” book from Microsoft Press, now a 2-volume 6th edition set, originally called “Inside Windows NT”, written by Helen Custer.

Windows UEFI Development (3 Days or 5 Days)

In this course, one can expect to learn the internals of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface inside and out, from the high-level concepts and overview of its functionality, down to the low-level development of actual UEFI applications, drivers, and services. The seminar will go over the history of UEFI’s development, from its original “Intel Boot Initiative” days to today’s SecureBoot facilities (and controversies), discuss the core UEFI data structures that form the basis of the environment, describe the different internal boot phases of the UEFI Runtime, and go in detail over the main UEFI protocols and their semantics. The course will also cover how UEFI leverages several Microsoft technologies, such as Authenticode and the Portable Executable (PE) format. Finishing off the lecture section will be a deep dive on how Windows 8 and later take advantage of UEFI to support booting off GPT disks, implementing SecureBoot, and speeding up the boot experience. Windows user-mode and kernel-mode APIs that interact with UEFI, as well as internal kernel data structures and capabilities in the UEFI HAL will also be shown off. Alongside the lecture period, attendees will get their hands dirty with bare-to-the-metal UEFI development using Visual Studio, as well as learning how to setup the UEFI SDK (EDK) to work alongside Microsoft’s development tools. Participants will get the chance to build their own UEFI applications, drivers, and runtime services, as well as learn how to debug and test their work in the OVMF environment alongside QEMU, without requiring actual UEFI hardware. The course will also show how to develop and build SecureBoot-compatible binaries. Finally, attendees will discover the Windows-specific Boot Application Runtime Environment, how to build compatible applications, and how to leverage the environment from both a UEFI and PCAT perspective. Attendees will then write both offensive and defensive UEFI code that hooks and/or protects the Windows Boot Loader.